Saturday, March 1, 1997

Q&A Eva Hoffman: "Polish Polish, Jewish Jewish"

Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review.

Date approximate.

. . . Several decades after the Holocaust, there is a
danger, for those of us who did not live through it, of a kind of automatism of
Jewish memory; of reiterating narratives of tragedy without any longer bothering
to think about them; of identifying with martyrdom without having earned the
right to it; of remaining fixated on the most awful moment so that we don't
have to look back to the more ambiguous past -- or forward to the troublingly
uncertain future.

"Shtetl" (1997)

HB: What led you to write "Shtetl"?

EH: Many things. It was initially commissioned as a sort of
companion book to the television documentary, "Shtetl." But, of
course, I took it on because I had my very personal and quite impassioned interest
in the subject.

I grew up in Poland as a Jewish person whose parents came
from a shtetl not very far from Bransk, about which I have written the book,
and not unlike Bransk. So it was a kind of excavation of personal history, an
attempt to understand it more. It also came from desire to reconcile the Polish
and the Jewish histories. I feel that I'm Polish and Jewish equally. I can't
disavow either part. They need to be in some sort of synthesis. The Jewish and
Polish participants in this history often have very opposed views and
interpretations. It is a painfully contested history surrounded by acute and
incendiary emotions.

At the same time, in the West, I have often encountered such
reductive views of Poland.

HB: Among Jews.

EH: Particularly among Jews, who have a tendency to conflate
Poland with Germany -- almost, sometimes, to transfer the bitterness against
Germany into bitterness against Poland. That is psychologically understandable
since Poland was the homeland, the place where the Holocaust happened. There is
a psychic association. That tendency was not helped by the Iron Curtain and a
postwar situation in which Poland became increasingly distanced from actual
contact, increasingly seen as the Other. And possibly the realm of savagery.

HB: Which is how the West is prone to construe the Slavic
world, isn't it? On the one side, civilization, on the other, barbarism.

EH: Indeed. Claude Lanzman said in an interview I conducted
with him that the West is human, the East is not. There is that kind of barrier
in the imagination --╩or has
been. The barriers are coming down along with the borders.

HB: The book seems aimed especially at Jews, at introducing
complexity and ambiguity into Jewish thinking.

EH: I am telling the part of the story which has been
forgotten. Certainly, when I'm in Poland I feel it absolutely incumbent upon
myself to answer whatever suggestion of anti-Semitism I encounter. But here it
seems to be the other part of the story which has been suppressed. Not
literally suppressed but repressed, perhaps, and forgotten.

HB: There is a sense in which "Shtetl" is a
continuation of "Lost in Translation." "Lost in
Translation" reconciles your being both Polish and American.
"Shtetl" attempts to reconcile your being Polish and Jewish.

EH: Yes. It has been a painful matter to me that these parts
of my identity are thought to be incompatible, that one has to somehow chose
one side or the other. I recently saw a reference to an interview with
Alexander Wat, one of the famous inter-war Polish poets who was Jewish, and a
great friend of Milosz. In fact, "My Century," an absolutely
wonderful book, came out of conversations between Wat and Milosz.

People kept asking Wat, are you Polish or are you Jewish?
And his answer was, "I'm Polish Polish, and Jewish Jewish."

HB: You are in a tradition of Poles who have taken up
English as their literary language. It's a pretty grand tradition, including
Conrad, Kosinski, and Malinowski.

EH: Though you compliment me too much by putting me in that
tradition, it is true there have been a number of Polish writers who have taken
on the English language, partly because there's been such a long history of
exile, emigration and exile in this direction.

HB: Coming here as a teenager, you had no choice. You had to
learn the language. Of course, Jerzy Kosinski, too, as an immigrant, had no
choice.

EH: He had some choices. There are people, even today, who
write in Polish and get themselves translated, but of course one is better off
if one can take on English.

HB: Yiddish was not a language of yours, was it?

EH: No, it wasn't.

HB: You refer to it, as used in your family, as "the
language of money and secrets."

EH: In fact, I was recently at a Yiddish festival where I
realized I understand half of Yiddish.

HB: Which half?

EH: The Polish half.

HB: In "Lost in Translation," you describe the
anguish you experienced leaving Poland, where it felt as though the rivers
spoke to you in a warm and familiar tongue. In "Shtetl," you describe
one forest, for instance, as "the source of poems and legends, the home of
bison, hermits, and conspiracies." In the United States, things felt cold
and remote, difficult to get hold of in words. But you are part of a generation,
the generation that came to consciousness in the sixties, that was defined by
alienation. In a sense, coming from afar, you had an advantage. You were able
to track your alienation rather than getting lost in it.

EH: It was a discovery I made after writing "Lost in
Translation" that it did seem to reflect the feelings of a generation. Of
course, I suppose on some level most humankind feels exiled in one way or
another, exiled from sort of true home, some sort of plenitude, some sort of
community, some sort of idea of belonging. Particularly in our time, exile and
migration are becoming more and more the normative condition. So I suppose my
situation did help me have a vantage point.

This is the great advantage -- for writing. Less of an
advantage for living. It gives you a bit of detachment. It places you at a kind
of oblique angle.

HB: You learned English by writing in your diary.

EH: I made my way into English through writing. This is how
I began to compose some sort of new identity which made sense.

HB: You write that this new, English-speaking self was more
comfortable "in the abstract sphere of thoughts and observations than in
the world. For a while, this impersonal self, this cultural negative
capability, becomes the truest thing about me."

EH: I was in an abstract relation to my new environment. I
was learning it a little like some fledgling anthropologist.

HB: Do you still have those diaries?

EH: I do! They're written in very tiny letters.

HB: Were you trying to hide them from yourself even as you
wrote them?

EH: Probably.

HB: You make a lovely observation at the end of "Lost
in Translation" about how a double consciousness, a bi-cultural self, is
already in some ways a multicultural self: "The apertures of perception
have widened because they were once pried apart. Just as they number
"2" implies all other number, so a bivalent consciousness is
necessarily a multivalent consciousness."

EH: Once you learn a second culture from within -- once you
understand the importance of culture, how much it structures us, how much it is
inscribed in our psyche -- you grasp the deep meaning of cultural difference;
you understand something about cultural possibility.

HB: You return constantly, in "Shtetl," to the
theme of multi-culturalism. You write that Poland was, for a period of its
history, a model of multi-culturalism.

EH: The book came, in part, from my observations of
multi-culturalism in America, problems of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relationships,
and was addressed to these problems.

It might be
surprising to many readers but in fact, yes, Poland has a very multi-cultural
history. At its peak, Poland prided itself on toleration, and had a genuine
history of toleration -- until a certain point.

HB: That point being?

EH: When Polish society begins to fall apart and decline --
partly because of invasions from various sides, partly from internal
contradictions -- when it begins to fall apart economically and in other ways,
then, yes, xenophobia, a very defensive sense of ethnic and national identity
begins to reassert itself.

One of the general lessons in studying this history was the
great influence, the great power, of economic and political circumstance. I
don't think that people are quintessentially loving of their neighbors or
quintessentially prejudiced or anti-Semitic. The instinct of natural tolerance
is very much present in ordinary life. Conflict needs to be inflamed in order
for prejudice to become very acute. But it can be inflamed and is inflamed
repeatedly.

HB: Are universalistic hopes luxuries? Can they survive
times when the heat is turned up?

EH: It is a very good question. The hope is to build very
strong structures and institutions to preserve the universalistic aspect of our
identities, and the common parts of our society. Without those structures, the
more antagonistic impulses can be inflamed.

We need structures that allow us to meet as members of the
same society, and know we are working with and trying to nurture the same
terrain. I don't have a blueprint. But I do think part of the problem of
Polish-Jewish relations in the inter-war period, when nationalism was
ascendant, is that there wasn't enough articulation of common interest on
either side. There was growing anti-Semitism and growing defensive nationalism
on the Polish part, and on the Jewish side, a sense of being beleaguered and
having to look out for their own interests.

HB: What is the response to the book, and to the PBS
documentary, "Shtetl," in Poland?

EH: The introduction to my book will be printed in one of
the main newspapers in Poland, so I might have some responses then. The film has
provoked enormous controversy. Two kinds of discussion go on in Poland now. One
is a scenario in which the two participants in the dialogue hurl escalating
accusations at each other. The Poles felt the film placed them in a terrible
light. They thought their national character was impugned. Another part of the
discussion of Jewish matters in Poland is much better, more thoughtful and
self-reflective. It asks, what do we Poles need to know about our
participation, our part of the responsibility for what happened to Jews in
Poland during the Holocaust? There's been a lot of conscience searching, a lot
of debate and rethinking of certain historical episodes.

HB: The movie did not seem unduly accusatory to me.

EH: This is where interpretations of history diverge.

HB: It's depressing that with a fraction of a fraction of a
fraction of Polish Jews remaining, the status of Polish Jews is still something
Poles need to argue about.

EH: There is a great Jewish revival going on in Poland as
well.

HB: I understand that revival to be taking place both among
Jews and among Poles who are taking on a kind of Yiddishkeit.

EH: Definitely. The whole post-war period did not help
because it really was a period of silence and repression. In a sense, public
discussion of these matters in Poland is behind that of other countries; all
these questions were on ice. So there is a leftover rhetoric that I and some of
my Jewish friends feel is a very troubling kind of speech, certainly, but
without real consequences. It is a kind of rhetoric without much basis.

Don't forget, Warsaw was one third or more Jewish, and in
these little towns often half the population or more was Jewish. This is in
fact one way in which Polish-Jewish history is exceptional. The Jews were a
large minority in Poland, as they weren't in Germany. They are missed, as a
part of landscape, as a part of life.

HB: You write that, "Sometimes villagers go to pray at
the graves of *tzaddiks* and rabbis, in the belief that these places and their
spirit possess magic powers."

Your recapitulation of Polish history reminds me of the
kinds of things David Biale, who you cite, asserts in "Power and
Powerlessness in Jewish history." He argues that Jews did not survive in
Europe for so long without some political power. That they had no political
power is an illusion beginning with the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment] in the
19th century, and carried over to Zionism.

EH: It's a damaging self-conception, a damaging
mystification to think of the whole of Jewish history in terms of
victimization, a case of nothing but extremely powerful oppressors and
extremely powerless victims.

HB: "Shtetl" also points to another mystification,
that Jews have always been a united and organic whole. "Shtetl" shows
that in Bransk in the 1930s Jews spent a fair amount of time fighting each
other, often physically, over political differences.

EH: But there was some sense in which the main conflict
could be externalized, always put in relation to the Other.

I've just been reading a fascinating and provocative essay
by A.B. Yehoshua called "Exile is a Neurotic Solution," in which he
points out something very simple that never occurred to me, which is that
during the 1800 years of the Jewish Diaspora it would have been just as easy
for Jews to live in Palestine as in the countries they did live in, maybe even
easier, and that Palestine was the one place they avoided consistently, and
always.

His interpretation is that exile was a neurotic solution, a
way of avoiding internal conflicts, such as the split between secular and
religious authority coming to the fore now in Israel. He's writing in anger
about emigration from Israel and insufficient immigration to it. He says if the
Jews had only loved Palestine as much as they loved Babylon or Poland . . .

HB: I like Yehoshua a lot, both his politics and his
fiction, without sharing his view that Israel is the one and only answer to
being Jewish.

EH: But it was a very eye-opening observation that Palestine
was a possibility all that time. There are cases: Kafka dreaming about
Palestine but never going, Walter Benjamin dreaming about it and never going.
Wanting to maintain paradise as a dream -- that's an important part of this
whole structure. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, could have gone to
Palestine. His brother went and kept saying, why don't you come?

HB: The end of "Lost in Translation" places you in
the midst of New York's literary society. Having started with a bitter
alienation from American culture, you wind up at one its centers, and work for
a while as editor at The New York Times Book Review, as a kind of cultural
arbiter or decision-maker.

EH: A gate-keeper. A fascination with culture and with
language makes for a sense of engagement, eventually. It may start with
detachment but it ends in engagement. Perhaps there is some useful or
productive point that one attains.

HB: And why, after all this fusion and synthesis, do you
wind up living in London?

EH: My not completely frivolous answer is that it's my
perfect midway point between Manhattan and Cracow.